Longacre Theatre

The Longacre Theatre is a Shubert Organization house on West 48th Street, with 1,077 seats on three levels. Producer Harry H. Frazee, who went on to buy the Boston Red Sox, built it in 1912–1913 for his own musicals. It has housed plays and musicals alike, from A Bronx Tale and The Prom to Leopoldstadt.

Its name recalls Longacre Square, which was renamed Times Square for The New York Times. The square had borrowed that label from Long Acre in London, since both areas made their living from carriages.

Henry B. Herts was the architect by January 1912, but strikes and a bankrupt contractor held up the work for months. The farce Are You a Crook? finally opened the house on May 1, 1913, and folded after 12 performances; the musical Adele became its first hit that August. Frazee sold his stake in November 1916 to concentrate on baseball, and the Shuberts took control in the mid-1920s.

In 1935 the Group Theatre brought Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die to Broadway here. During World War II the building was leased to broadcasters, and for roughly a decade it served as a radio and later television studio. Plays returned in October 1953.

Later highlights include Julie Harris in The Lark (1955) and Zero Mostel's Tony-winning performance in Rhinoceros (1961). Still, the house struggled to land hits: in 1987 it was reported empty for 201 of the previous 208 weeks. There were exceptions. The Fats Waller revue Ain't Misbehavin' began here in May 1978 and won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God (1980) won Tonys for best play and both leads, and the 1987 landmark report counted its 887 performances as the theater's longest run to date.

City landmark status for the exterior and the auditorium came on December 8, 1987. Shubert, Nederlander and Jujamcyn sued over 22 such designations, the Longacre among them, and lost in 1992. Meanwhile, a November 1991 plan to turn the idle theater into a community courtroom met protests from theater people, and the court went to another site; Tango Pasion reopened the stage in April 1993.

Diana Rigg won a Tony Award for her Medea here in 1994. After a 2007–2008 restoration, the doors opened again in May 2008 with Boeing-Boeing; it and La Cage aux Folles (2010) were both Tony-winning revivals. During The Prom in 2019, two women married on the Longacre stage, the first such wedding known on Broadway. Shut by the pandemic on March 12, 2020, the Longacre came back on November 2, 2021, when Diana began previews.

Henry B. Herts (1871–1933), who had designed the New Amsterdam and the Lyceum with Hugh Tallant, worked alone here; the landmark report calls it his last known theater design. The symmetrical terracotta front, in a neo-French Classic style, rises over a granite base. Six fluted pilasters frame five bays, with three tall windows in the center. Each pilaster carries a carved urn in acanthus leaves and a female figure of Drama with masks and scrolls, and lion heads run along the cornice.

Inside, the room is slightly broader than it is long. Herts used two shallow, low balconies rather than a single one, which keeps the upper seats near the stage. The flat-arched proscenium is close to square, 35 feet wide and 34 feet 10 inches tall, with one curved box on each side. Michael Kostow's 2007–2008 restoration brought back stripped plasterwork on the balcony and box fronts, a gold-and-green palette close to the original, and new lounges in the basement and the attic.

The theater is only partly wheelchair accessible. Every part of the orchestra is step-free; it holds the three wheelchair spaces and aisle seats with folding armrests. The mezzanine is two flights up and the balcony four. A small elevator (45 by 41 inches, 32-inch door) does not fit every wheelchair and serves the accessible restroom; other restrooms are 20 steps down.

Infrared listening devices are offered at every show, and starting four weeks after opening night, free audio description and captioning devices as well; earlier, CART captioning can be booked two weeks ahead. Children under four are not admitted.